The damage to the theater was so bad, the owners of the 22-year-old business had to shut down.

“Yeah it was tough for everybody. It was tough for the owners to do that, because they had been with the cast. We are like a family,” said Skylar Rankin, the theater’s sales and marketing director.

The hurricane ripped a huge hole in the ceiling of the theater. The shutdown meant the owners had to let 200 employees go while they worked on fixing the wreckage.

“It’s always tough, when you work and you do what you do, and you love what you do,” said Ethan Riewaldt, a cast member. “Then you have to kind of sit there and go, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Riewaldt plays Captain Sebastian, “The Black,” and was one of the many let go in September. But in the beginning of 2018, he was one of the many staff rehired. He laughs that now Irma is part of the show.

“Well I will tell you it wasn’t a nor’easter, it wasn’t even a typhoon, and it wasn’t the ghost of Davy Jones. It was actually Irma! She just ripped the roof right off of our building,” he said in his Captain Sebastian voice.

But then on April 9fire pushed their re-opening back even more.

“We were about to open in May for the new show, and then a fire happened — it burnt down the front of our ship,” Rankin said.